Pseudo-Hugo: Shards of Honor

Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold, published 1986
(In-universe #1 chronologically in the Miles Vorkosigan Saga)

This is just a sort of informal write-up. Three books in this series have won Hugo awards so I decided it was necessary to read the entire series. I’m in for a long haul with it and I’d been avoiding it as I was laboring under the misapprehension that it was a huge fantasy series. It is not—it is resolutely science fiction. There are far-flung planets, wormholes, space battles, weird alien lifeforms, etc. Yes, it’s science fiction, albeit a bit off somehow.

To begin with, this book starts off on a raging torrent of awesome that runs off the charts of awesomeness. There’s a fairly moody legendary military butcher and a fairly moody initially awesome and ultimately wishy-washy redhead (held up as a paragon, naturally) who are mashed together out of necessity when left behind after a botched joint-assassination+ambush attempt. Please don’t ask. It makes sense in context. At any rate, it’s this redhead Cordelia’s apparent wobblyness and the sudden violent inthrusting of pro-life, rape-is-ok mentality that makes me a little reluctant to like this book (rape is apparently ok if people take care of the babies later). The rating swung from a resolute five stars to a two and a half mark within about two chapters. However, it took a mild upswing when psychologists were portrayed as emotional criminals who harass their victims into taking drastic action. That maybe ups it back to three hypothetical stars. This was enjoyable, and I don’t expect a book’s views to jive with mine, but I’m tetchy about things like rape and overpopulation (meaning people having far too many children). So hopefully the rest of the five million novels I have to read in this series to get to the Hugos won’t veer off into moral preaching land like some of the other Hugos I’ve read. And then I will be able to ignore the improper logic and misplaced humanitarianism and enjoy the sci-fi.

Something I was thinking about, however, while reading was the fact that fantasy novels tend to be set in medieval European worlds with distinct species in place of races where there is justifiable racism and odd treatment of women by modern Western standards. So far, the existence of a patriarchal politically volatile militaristic planet like Barrayar is just that same sort of excuse to have women be the strong sturdy (silent) backbone for men. We shall see. I am probably very wrong in this assumption, but it’s what was at the forefront of my mind at some points.

At any rate, don’t get me wrong. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. This will simply serve as a reminder to myself should things begin to rub me the wrong way.